Secure Registration Protocol for the Internet of Drones Using Blockchain and Physical Unclonable Function Technology

Abstract

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have become increasingly popular in recent years and are applied in various fields, from commercial and scientific to military and humanitarian operations. However, their usage presents many challenges, including limited resources, scalability issues, insecure communication, and inefficient solutions. We developed a secure and scalable registration protocol to address these issues using LoRa technology. Our solution involves the usage of the physical unclonable function (PUF) and blockchain technology for key exchange. PUF also ensures security against physical tampering, and blockchain is applied to share the symmetric key among the base stations. After the registration, the later communication messages are encrypted with AES-GCM to provide authentication and confidentiality between the parties. We conducted a security analysis of the registration protocol using the ProVerif tool, and our solution meets the security requirements, including the mutual authentication of entities, key freshness, key secrecy and also key confirmation properties. Besides the Proverif-based analysis, an informal security analysis is also provided that shows that the registration is protected against a variety of well-known active and passive security attacks. As drone resources are limited, we also prepared a proof of concept to test our solution under real-life conditions, focusing on efficiency and lightweight operations.